The Regrettes: "The new album is a love story, it's a cautionary tale"

Lydia Night is a tough cookie; she's just gone a bit softer in the middle now. On The Regrettes' second album ‘How Do You Love?' they're sweet and salty, telling the story of our character falling in and out of love, delivering banger after banger along the way.

There's not just love on the brain though. In the two years since the release of their debut album ‘Feel Your Feelings Fool!', The Regrettes have opened the main stage at Reading & Leeds, toured with Twenty One Pilots, had all of their gear nicked in the process, lost a bassist and got two new ones, and released an EP AND numerous singles and covers. Not bad for Lydia, who's barely out of high school.

So we call up our California friends (lol) for a little catch-up, and to find out some more about their new record. Hey Lydia! What can you tell us about the new album? The new album is a love story, and it's more of a cautionary tale or leads on that side of it, and we want people to listen in order for sure. It's a bit of a different vibe from the last one, the last one was like "fuck u!!" and now it's like "luv u". Totally, but it also turns into that, I think it shows that it's not all love songs that's for sure, it's developmental, there are a lot of changes in feelings and it kind of walks you through that. It's more of a mature record, did that happen naturally? Yeah, I think it happened naturally, but we also did wanna make sure our second record wasn't too similar to the first. The music we were writing wasn't that similar to the first anyway, so that was easy to do, but there was a conscious decision just to let ourselves make the music that we wanted to make.

On the first album, you'd mentioned you'd written a lot of the songs yourself before it was even going to be a record. Was it the same for this one? For this one, it was more of a collaboration. Some of the songs I wrote with our producer Mike, some of the songs we all wrote together as a band, just a big mix. A lot of them I still wrote alone, but it's definitely more of a collaboration. What sort of inspiration did you have for it? Just life experience, it's all based on life experience. Some of it's more exaggerated than others, but it's all come from different relationships that I've been in. Do you have a favourite track on the record? I think right now my favourite would be ‘Colouring Book', but it's changing, it's a constant changing thing, but that's what's been stuck in my head. I wanted to talk about the opening part because it's so sweet. Was that a poem you wrote? Aw, thank you! Yeah, I didn't know what it was gonna turn into at first, and then I just thought it'd be the perfect pre-album thing to have, to set up the story and have the listener like ready, prepared for this journey. And I like that it comes back to it at the end but from a different perspective. Was that intentional? Thank you! Yeah, oh yeah the whole thing was intentional. How long have you been working on the record? I mean, working on it and writing and everything, kind of since our first album came out, a little after I wanna say, so a few years. We only started recording it though a year ago. Who were you working with on it this time? Mike Elizondo, who actually produced our first album and produced our second, but did a great job of having it like sound sonically totally new. It still feels true to who we are, but it takes on a new and fresh outlook and approach to it.